Take me back to the start, the solo show by the Bari artist Jara Marzulli, curated by Roberto Lacarbonara, inaugurates at 7 pm on Friday, December 20, at the Contemporary Art Gallery E-lite studiogallery of Lecce,.

Unseen works, oil paintings and drawings never exhibited before, for a show which, as the curator states in the catalogue, "unfolds the narrative of a distorted memory, the look turned towards a past impossible to recognise as the horizon of time produces an insidious estrangement of the individual towards herself. Marzulli’s bodies are always immersed in an unreal placenta, a visual space devoid of scene, with no perspective, a dreamlike place where an immediate coexistence of reality and fantasy is possible. What happens is that a multitude of signs, allegories, animal presence and visual bursts emerge, and they all lead to a third mnemonic space, to a “start”, a beginning that has no past but only an ideality: a start that is always different, that alters a human’s present time again and again. The Bari artist is all along fully immersed in a rigorous search of realism around the condition of a body. She elaborates a new experience of metamorphosis through existential traces assimilated by the skin that shows clearly all the unsolved and conflictual relationships that everybody experiences during lifetime".

The exhibition’s title – "Take me back to the start", taken from the song "Even though elsewhere" of Carmilla and the Secret of the Cherries, written by Giuliana Schiavone – sounds like an invitation to the visitor almost whispered by the artist to experiment with her the intermediate dimension of thought and experience which is the equivalent of child transitional area. It deals with that potential space between the individual and the environment; an early and important bridge between self and other; a "beginning" in which all the thought and the creative process take place to develop the reflexive personal autonomy, to seize the opportunity that each one wants for himself and to give a new and personal meaning to the existence and to the world, starting from past social and cultural experiences.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Editrice Salentina and can be visited until January 31 (Tue - Sat: 5 pm – 8 pm, free entrance). As told by the gallery owner Claudia Pellegrino "it is the first solo exhibition, dedicated to one of the artists who collaborate with E-lite, to be presented in the headquarters of the gallery. The exhibition fully reflects our will of making a quality offer, both artistic and cultural, mainly on painting, in the context of figuration.

During Christmas holydays the show will observe the following special openings: Sunday 22 and Monday 23 from 5 am to 8.30 pm, Tuesday 24 from 10 am to 12 am and from 4 pm to 7 pm.